Entry and presentation of election results at count and on Internet

Andrew Bennett, e-Government Officer

ICT Services have presented results on the screen at the counts of previous elections.
They have also placed those results for public access on the council's website.
While this has been done successfully, it has been labour intensive and prone to errors.

For the Parliamentary and County Council Elections of 5th May 2005, ICT Services engaged the services of Tagish (a specialist local government software developer).
ICT services worked closely with Tagish to develop the Election Results System (ERS) to meet our requirements.

 

ERS provides structured tools to enter all information required about the election and candidates prior to the count, and efficient tools to enter results and statistics as required at the count.
ERS displays results on the screen in both tabulated and graphical format, both as an election summary and as detailed contest results.
The system generates the base text that is used to generate emails of results to the County Council, and for the Local Alert text message and email results service, which were also launched at this election.

 

Results only need to be entered once, into the master database, the system then generates the required outputs: Display at Count, Internet results pages, and printable pages.

 

The system provides a Returning Officer Console, allowing the Returning Officer to see on screen a list of wards showing which are ready to declare, and allows those to be opened and declared from the screen.

The system was delivered on time and was used at the election as planned.
The results screens were well received by those present and results were instantly posted to the Internet as soon as they were declared.
The totals and statistics generated by ERS were used to verify manual calculations made by elections staff.

Technology Briefing - Local Alert